w20754
| Title | Silent Spring |
| Contributors |
George Newson (composer) |
| Composition date | 1990 |
| Duration (mins) | 0 |
| Category | vocal ensemble |
| Instrumentation | Voices / 1011 / 2000 8 Vn 4 Va 3 Vc Db |
| Commissioned by | Primavera Chamber Orchestra with funds provided by South East Arts Association |
| Key signature | |
| First line | |
| First performed | 05 07 1990 Primavera Chamber Orchestra and children from Maidstone schools conducted by the composer. Oakwood Park Community Centre |
| Notes | |
| Programme Note | My composition Silent Spring was first conceived twenty-five years ago shortly after I had read a book of the same title written by the American scientist Rachel Carson. This important and disturbing book was an early warning to 20th-century readers of humankind's destruction of the environment in which we live, including the biosphere. I had the opportunity to realise a composition on this subject in 1967 when I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research electronic music in the USA. In the University of Illinois I made the first version of Silent Spring - it was a tape piece based on some sounds of nature such as bird song, animal calls, primitive song etc. The tape included a spoken text which was taken from writings found in the Old Testament, Plato and Chekhov. This text illustrated aspects of the destruction of the environment. I have continued this historical approach in the second realisation of Silent Spring by using the original text plus poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and myself. Here the words are sung, instead of spoken, and they are divided between a large chorus, a chamber choir and a baritone soloist. There are no electronic or recorded wildlife sounds in this new version, instead there is a chamber orchestra which occasionally imitates sounds of nature. For instance, the opening section, which imitates a dawn chorus, is based on the song of the nightingale. The work ends with Hopkins' elegiac words: 'What would this world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, Wildness and wet. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.' (George Newson, 28 June 1990) |
This work is associated with the following collection items:
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